Reanimation
by Amadelia
Summary: Harry is still losing the struggle against the neurological strain of saving the magical world, and his friends have succumbed to other interests and desires for themselves. Yet meanwhile a new enemy threatens to reawaken...at Harry's direct expense.
1. Chapter I : Still Sleeping

**Title:** Reanimation

**Author:** Amadelia

**Disclaimer:** Original characters are mine, J.K.'s characters are hers. Not to be confused.

**Chapter I**

The sound of water dripping was the one constant that Anais used to register whether she was alive or dead. After first gaining the correct sensory faculties to actually recognize the steady dripping, she allowed for the expansion of cognizance. She stretched and curled her fingers, listened to the screams or grunts of pain in the cells near her, listened to her own laborious breathing. If these signs of feeling, pain, and suffering showed themselves, she knew therefore that she was alive, and cursed the very fertilization of her mother's egg from which she was created.

After only three months here Anais had learned that sight was only a passage to the unthinkable-a deeper, more excruciating pain than she experienced with her eyes closed-which was enough to wish her dead, obliterated completely into a never ending blankness. With the knowledge that sight was only betrayal to the part of her that desired some sort of peace and sanity, she chose to exercise the facility of listening more often than not-it was more exact, and didn't lead her into depression as sight might-in some twisted way, it seemed to be the only sense that she wanted to keep with her. Thus now, after eight months here, she never opened her eyes, unless it was unavoidable. The sounds of suffering in this hell house were hard enough to endure on their own; the last thing that Anais needed was a visual accompaniment to this auditory hell-if she had any illusions left about the place, she wanted to keep them.

She had learned to stop feeling in the past eight month. She was utterly and completely numb to any natural pain or fear that she technically should be experiencing due to her hellish confinement here. Although she didn't have the ability to experience a complete shutdown, something closer to a coma than she experienced now, the senses that stayed with her Anais speculated subconsciously that perhaps were something she wanted to keep. She had a strange, inexplicable feeling, a whine that complained that it didn't want utter and complete physical and mental separation from this tomb. Although it embraced the feeling of living death, rather than the living dying that Anais should be exposed to, it also wanted a touch of reality and life to make it qualify for somewhat animated death. Keeping her emotions and physical motions sanctioned was enough, so she told herself on the rare moments that she exercised cognitive thought. During these moments, she relented, coming to believe that perhaps these four months left of hell and punishment might be what she needed to regain the sanity, or at least gain the sanity, that she often wondered whether she was born with. And so she accepted her temporary fate-she stopped thinking, feeling, desiring. Her body slept as her spirit regained some sort of strength from the source of the comforting absolution from life, and slowly the flames of her Soul began burning brighter, climbing higher.

Somehow, her body had adapted to this twisted form of what was supposed to be considered existence...known to the excommunicated outside as Azkaban.

At Number 4, Privet Drive, Harry Potter leapt up, sweating, from his bed, the pain in his scar lighting his entire body on fire.


	2. Chapter II : Friends Will be Friends

**Title:** Reanimation

**Author:** Amadelia

**Disclaimer:** Original characters are mine, J.K.'s characters are hers. Not to be confused.

**Chapter II**

"No, no, really, this is good, Harry," Ron said, walking calmly around his living room, twirling the plastic cord of his phone nonchalantly. "I mean, seriously, this is reassuring. It's good to know for certain that I'm best friends with a maniac. I mean, it would be a – a total shame if it turned out that _I_ were the madman, and really you were particularly normal and your scar pains were just what they were." Ginny poked her head into the doorway tentatively, mouth open as though to offer some officious advice, but Ron waved her away, frowning slightly. "What do I think you should do? What do you think I'm going to tell you? Tell someone from the Ministry immediately, you fool. In case, you know, you're being possessed. Again. God, you really are exciting! At this point I might as well let Dad know that he can forget fumbling with the wiring for the television that he's trying to put in – I mean, seriously. You're fantastic." His hand brushed the open glass bottle of amber liquid dangerously close to the coffee table's edge – he stumbled slightly to catch it before it fell. "I mean, no, of course I'm sorry – look, you can't go to Hermione about this, I mean, really, you're not going to find anyone more supportive than I am, and – Harry?" He held the phone away from his ear for a moment, tentatively, then stared at it for a moment. "Fuck," he uttered sharply, slipping the phone back into its cradle and taking a deep swig of the queer liquid.

"So 'fuck' is all that you have to say?" Ginny said with a glare, stalking into the living room as though she'd been waiting outside the door, preparing her best method to lambast him once the conversation was over– _as she most likely has been, the unpleasant brat_, Ron mulled to himself, tossing his reddish hair from his eyes to stare at her with his dull blue eyes. He rotated his hand idly, swirling the liquid in vague patterns within the bottle; he frowned in slight caution. She stopped just past the doorway, looking dangerously livid, eyes sparking with nasty energy and lips curled preemptively for a snarl – she glared at the beautiful amber which twinkled, sun whirling through, and her face reddened. "You're a fucking drunkard, Ron. Your closest friend calls because he's fucked in the head and you tell him he's a riot? _Inconsiderate_ – you know I'll be telling mum and dad the moment they get back from vacation, the _moment_ they get back. Where the fuck do you get that nasty shit anyway?" At some point she had moved towards him – he blinked awkwardly in surprise as she snatched the bottle from his loose grasp sharply, the liquid dashing on the side of the bottle as though preparing for a tempest.

"It's from Fred and George's room," he said slowly, "And I don't get it."

Ginny's face was still stained ruby with her efforts to restrain herself. "You don't get _what_?" she asked sharply, lips tight.

"I mean, what?" he asked vaguely, still frowning with tentative caution.

"_Fucking_ hilarious," she said angrily, turning away from him, her thin knuckles pale with the force she exerted on the bottle as she held it, hair flaming as much as her fury. "You know you're supposed to call the fucking Ministry if something like this happens, especially after last time – that's why we installed fucking phones in this house," she muttered, grabbing a black pea coat from where it haphazardly lay on the floral armchair near the door and swinging it over her shoulder.

"Well, well where the fuck do _you_ think you're going?" Ron slurred awkwardly, blinking at a rapid pace. "Whatever, we were just having fun! I mean, that's what friends do on the telephone, you saucy whore," he said, watching with a mixture of fear and amusement as her step slowed and she ground to a halt.

"Saucy _whore_?" she enunciated slowly, body visibly quivering, backlit oddly by the lamp by the door. She began to turn towards him, but stopped at such an angle that he could just barely see her bite her lip. "...Right, Ron. But no, that's not how friends talk on the telephone," she said in a low, careful voice, "That's not how they talk at all."

The door opened, and he could hear the bottle being dashed on the stone walkway – a waste, really – he could feel the slight breeze, hear the chimes outside, and so the light flooded in and receded in the moment before she slammed the door behind her, filling Ron with a strange feeling that he might have called a mixture of love and resentment. He sat back on the living room couch, staring out the window at the sun, the bright, vivid green of the lawn, the shrubs, the trees, the roads far below, blankly attempting to avoid being pensive. But it was difficult – "I knew her; I knew she was trapped, and I knew it was wrong, and I knew she wanted something that she would die for... " sounded awkwardly like Harry's references to his past dreams of Voldemort, of serpenthood, of the Ministry at night – except this time Harry had said Azkaban, and this time, Ron didn't know what to say.

The phone rang, breaking up his unintended reverie viciously. He was almost thankful, until he realized that the caller was Tonks.


End file.
